Charlotte Shields-Rossi | a&e editor

The Oracle, the official student newspaper of SUNY New Paltz published an article on May 7, 1998, about the departure of Michael Dillon, a literary journalism professor at the university.

“Professor Michael J. Dillon, the much admired and respected SUNY Journalism professor, is leaving at the end of August to go back to the coal-mining region of his Pennsylvania roots to share his wisdom and experience with a new gang of students and colleagues at Duquesne University,” the article titled “Michael Dillon goes ‘On the Road’” read.

Dillon is once again going on the road as he retires at the end of the semester. This time he is packing up and heading west to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.

After 27 years of teaching at Duquesne, Dillon has held many titles as a former member of the publications board, Society of Professional Journalists adviser and department chair. Most recently, he has served as internship director and also the adviser to the award-winning Off the Bluff magazine. But still he said that his biggest accomplishments have been watching his students surpass him. 

“I’ve had several thousand accomplishments, they’re called former students. Part of winding down my career has been reaching to some of the students that I had an affinity for when I was teaching,” Dillon said.

One of those students, Chris Daley, he taught in 2005. Daley currently works as the senior director of digital marketing at UMPC Health Plan and as an adjunct professor at Duquesne. He is also the founder of TEDXPittsburgh. Before all that, Daley took Dillon’s literary journalism class, where he met his future wife Bridget Daley. For the past two decades, the Daleys and Dillon have remained close friends. The couple even invited the professor to their wedding.

“Dr. Dillon is a legend in my family because me and Bridget met in his class. Our first date was on assignment,” Daley said. “He has gone to dinner with our parents, met our kids, he has been around for a lot of milestones.”

When Daley is in a board meeting, or teaching classes at Duquesne he tries to captivate an audience, a skill he learned from Dillon. That literary journalism class taught him how to be a good storyteller, but also why it is important.

“He taught me to care about the truth, the humanity side of things, if they go unnoticed they go unwritten,” Daley said.

Being both a written and verbal storyteller is the ethos of Dillon’s teaching style. His philosophy is “tell people something worth knowing in a compelling and memorable manner.”

Katie Blackley, 2014 Duquesne graduate, took Dillon’s class about media and U.S. history her senior year. She remembers during those classes her professor brought in guest speakers.

“He always brought in cool people that he knew,” Blackley said. “A full spectrum of what journalism could look like.”

Blackley, who works for 90.5 WESA, is now one of those guest speakers. Although she has already graduated, she has come back to talk with current students on multiple occasions.

“He has always given us a platform to expand their media horizons,” she said. “He is just such a great advocate for local journalism.”

Julian Routh, former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writer, member of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize and now public relations specialist for the Wounded Warrior Project, graduated from Duquesne in 2016. During that time, he took both media ethics and magazine journalism with Dillon.

“He teaches you to be fearless, to stand up for what is right, to never waiver,” Routh said.

Dillon, who spent time covering the aftermath of 9/11 at ground zero, began an internship program that sent Duquesne students to New York City for the summer to work at the 9/11 tribute museum. Routh was one of those students. That summer Dillon came to visit him, and he noticed how much the people involved in the program admired the professor.

“I remember the immense amount of respect they had for him, I felt like I wasn’t alone in that aspect,” Routh said.

Ember Duke, 2025 graduate and staff writer for TribLive, took Dillon’s multiplatform newsroom II class her sophomore year. She said that Dillon would share stories of being a former reporter, which helped cement her aspirations of becoming one herself.

“I always think back to the life lessons he gave us as a reporter: Dedicate yourself to the job,” Duke said. “He relays the meaningfulness of this career.”

On top of learning the basics like AP style, she said Dillon taught her what makes people good at the job. One day while in class, he wrote down a list of words that described a good reporter, one of those words — tenacious — stuck with Duke, something she has tried to be in her career.

As the end of the year approaches and Dillon begins his new journey, he expresses his confidence in the university and department in picking a qualified replacement. He said that his future predecessor’s greatness should come from their own sensibility and motivation.

“[That is] what I did, I sound like [Frank] Sinatra but I did it my way,” he said.

Dillon’s last class of his last semester will end with him thanking his students, a ritual he has adopted in his years of teaching, the connection he has had with them is what he cherished and what he will miss most.

“That’s 99% of the experience, that’s the good stuff and fortunately that is what you spend most of your time doing, most of your time as a professor, you’re doing the good stuff,” he said.

Charlotte Shields-Rossi can be reached at shieldsrossic@duq.edu